American Studies • Cognitive Science • Environmental Sciences • Interdisciplinary Studies •
Letters & Science • Mass Communications • Religious Studies • Letters & Science
• AMERICAN STUDIESFall 2009
To apply for a position listed below, print out our GSI application coversheet, available as a PDF download. Attach a cv and a current transcript. These three documents constitute the application. Send one copy of this application to the professor teaching the course, and one copy to Marcia Condon, American Studies, 301 Campbell, U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2922. Follow up with the professor. Any further questions can be directed to Marcia Condon, Student Affairs Advisor, American Studies (mcondon@berkeley.edu).
GSI POSITIONS
- All positions are pending budgetary approval.
Positions are 50% at the GSI I, II or III level, depending on teaching experience.
Unless otherwise noted here or by the professor, each GSI will teach two sections of 25 students. Sections meet once a week for one hour.10 - American Education and the American Dream (4 units) - CC# 02003
MW 2:00-4:00 2 Leconte Instructors: M. Brilliant
Sec. 101: CC# 02006 Tu 08:00-09:00, 221 Wheeler
Sec. 102: CC# 02009 Tu 11:00-12:00, 41 Evans
Sec. 103: CC# 02012 W 01:00-02:00, 106 Wheeler
Sec. 104: CC# 02015 M 01:00-02:00, 258 DwinelleThis class will explore the relationship between American education – its history, law, policy, and culture – and the American Dream, which views schooling as the most integral, public institutional means to its realization. This subject, in turn, will serve as a lens for exposing students to the development and methodological approaches of American Studies. Given their many distinctively American attributes, American education, the American Dream, and the relationship between the two provide an ideal lens for learning about American Studies – the only academic field of inquiry that takes America as a whole as its unit of analysis. To begin with, when it comes to education, Americans, in fact, put their money where their mouth is. A recent report of educational expenditures among the United States and the other seven leading industrialized countries that comprise the G-8, for example, found that "the United States ranked highest among the G-8 countries in terms of expenditure per student at the combined primary and secondary education levels as well as at the higher education level." (By contrast, the United States spends significantly less than its industrialized counterparts on most social welfare programs.) Of course, overall expenditures – the bulk of which come from state and local tax revenues and, for K-12 alone, outstrip annual spending on social security and national defense, which are the largest items in the federal budget – mask profound inequalities in spending both within and between states. These statistics, in turn, reflect another distinctively American feature of its educational system: its highly localistic nature, consisting of some 15,000 separate school districts. Among the specific topics this course will tackle are: the origins of public school systems during the half century or so after the American Revolution; the evolution of public school systems in response to the transformations wrought by immigration, industrialization, and geopolitics; the recurring culture wars over curricular content; the efficacy of public education at promoting (or precluding) socioeconomic mobility; and the sociolegal struggles over desegregation and school finance equalization. Each of these subjects speaks in some way to the role of schooling in supporting (or thwarting) equality of opportunity, which resides at the heart of the American Dream.
C112A – American Built Environment (4 units) - CC# 02039
TTh 11:00-12:30 112 Wurster Instructor: P. Groth
Also cross-listed as ED c169A, Geog c160A.
Sec. 101: CC# 02042 Tu 01:00-02:00, 170 Wurster
Sec. 102: CC# 02045 W 12:00-01:00, 170 Wurster
Sec. 103: CC# 02048 Th 10:00-11:00, 170 Wurster
Sec. 104: CC# 02051 Th 04:00-05:00, B51 HildebrandThis course introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundings: homes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts, and regions. The course encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.
Note that although this course deals with culture, and America, it does not deal equally with three different cultures. Thus, it does NOT satisfy the University’s American Cultures requirement. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement for American Studies majors.
READER POSITIONS - To apply for a reader position, please contact the appropriate faculty member. There is one reader position for each course, unless otherwise noted. All positions are pending budgetary approval and sufficient enrollment numbers.
101, Section 01 – The Harlem Renaissance (4 Units) - CC# 02021
TTh 09:30-11:00 155 Donner Lab Instructor: C. Palmer
This course explores the social, cultural, political and personal awakenings in the literature, art and music of the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is remembered as a time (roughly 1918-1930) when, in the midst of legal segregation and increasing anti-black mob violence, black American writers, artists, philosophers, activists, and musicians, congregating in New York City's Harlem, reclaimed the right to represent themselves in a wide range of artistic forms and activist movements. This course will focus on the forces that led to this "renaissance" as well as those that fueled it. Primary texts for this course include Jean Toomer, Cane; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; George Schuyler, Black No More; Nella Larsen, Passing; poetry by Langston Hughes; and works by Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and others.
American Studies 101AC– The Age of Monopoly: American Culture 1865-1929 (4 units) - CC# 02024
TTh 02:00-03:30 155 Donner Lab Instructor: M. Cohen
Between the end of the Civil War and start of the First Great Depression, the United States of America transformed itself from an isolationist and agricultural country into the richest, most powerful nation in the world. This era is characterized by the stunning growth of industrial and finance capitalism and the seemingly insignificant birth of what quickly became the dominant institution in our world: the modern business corporation. The building of vast corporate monopolies in money, steel, tobacco, movies, food, oil, electricity, organized crime, etc. reorganized every aspect of American life and culture from our cities to our sports, from our politics to our popular entertainment. The Age of Monopoly represents the birth of modern America, and with these great changes came epic social, sexual and racial conflicts characterized by the often violent clash of labor and capital, the repression of African American rights and the triumph of white supremacy, the cataclysmic end to 400 years of Indian wars, the challenge of feminism and the New Woman, the confrontation of Americans with the rest of the world in the form of mass immigration and imperial expansion, the rise of major reform and revolutionary movements, and the growth of state institutions dedicated to stopping them. The focus of this class will be to consider the economic and political changes of the Age of Monopoly through a study of its culture, for it was this half-century that gave birth to modern American culture in the form of illustrated magazines and comic strips, world's fairs and amusement parks, Wild West shows and vaudeville, the advertising and public relations industry, window shopping and department stores, skyscrapers and national parks, military buildups and IQ tests, talk radio and Jazz music, automobiles and suburbs, and most importantly, the Hollywood movie. Course will require two short papers, a mid-term and final exam.
Readings include:
W.E.B Dubois, Souls of Black Folk; Alix Shulman ed, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader; Hamilton Holt, ed. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves; Grey Brechin, Imperial San Francisco; Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness
American Studies 110 – Advertising America - (4 units) – CC# 02030
TTh 03:30-05:00 155 Donner Lab Instructor: K. Moran
This course will discuss: 1.) the way advertising reflects and constructs American history and culture; 2.) a number of approaches to "reading" and decoding advertising images; and 3.) the practices of advertising from the perspective of the industry.102, Section 01 - Indian Reservations as Place (4 units) – CC# 02027
TuTh 12:30-02:00 9 Evans Instructor: K. Biestman
The course explores the role of Indian Country in American history, law, economics, literature, popular culture, identity and imagination. The course addresses frontier cultural intersections and representations, dueling political, economic and spiritual philosophies, and tribal survivance. Specific analysis will be given to the built environment (Indian casinos, tourist destinations), landscapes (historic battlegrounds, sacred geography) and constructed realities/fictions (film, sports mascots).
American Studies C111E, Section 2 – A Gallery of Wonders, Curiosities, Spectacles, Cynics, and Suckers: Consumer Culture in Post-Civil War America (4 units) - CC# 02036
MW 04:00-05:30 170 Barrows Instructor: D. McQuade
Also cross-listed as English 136, Section 2.
This course will focus on the interrelations of the rise of consumerism and the culture industry in post-Civil War America. We will examine a wide range of materials, including advertisements (especially patent medicine ads), trade cards, commercial art and photography, dime novels, other best sellers as well as literary works, popular magazines, amusement parks and large-scale exhibitions. The course will begin with the remarkable and long-lived career of P. T. Barnum, at times a moral reformer, a habitual hoaxer, an insightful critic, a savvy expert at “puffery,” a master of images, and an impresario who transcended local cultural markets to cultivate a powerful and profitable presence on the national and global stage. We will end with The Columbian Exposition, a World's Fair held in Chicago to observe the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World as well as to celebrate America’s belief in its exceptionalism and its industrial and cultural optimism. Along the way, we will read generous selections from The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader as well as novels by Horatio Alger (Ragged Dick, Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks), Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), Orison Swett Marden (Pushing to the Front), and Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), as well as such texts as Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” (one of the most successful “sermons” on the sanctity of wealth), and selections from Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, and Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” among others. Throughout the course, we will consider the ways in which consumerism sponsored major economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the everyday lives of Americans in the late-nineteenth century. We will also consider these texts as opportunities to study methodological approaches and theoretical debates.
Fall 2008
C1. Introduction to Cognitive Science. (4)
Three hours of lecture and two hours of discussion per week. This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Lectures and readings will survey research from artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience, and will cover topics such as the nature of knowledge, thinking, remembering, vision, imagery, language, and consciousness. Sections will demonstrate some of the major methodologies.
Application Process
To apply for the Cognitive Science positions listed here, please contact the instructor, Jennifer Hudin, directly. She can be reached at the following email address: hudin@berkeley.edu
Spring 2009
GSI position description for ES10 Fall Term
The foundation course, Introduction to Environmental Sciences (ES 10) is co-instructed by Professors Bill Berry (EPS) and Matt Kondolf (LAEP) in the fall semesters. About 150 students from diverse departments, including non-science majors, enroll in this course every year. The main topics covered include geology and earthquakes, ecosystems science, watershed processes, environmental justice, and biodiversity. Students conduct hands-on field-based research, using sites around campus such as Strawberry Creek as an outdoor laboratory in weekly lab/discussion sections.
GSIs serving a 25% appointment for ES 10 attend all lectures, M,W, F from 9:10-10:00 a.m. GSIs also teach one 2-hour discussion section each week. In addition, GSIs grade student work (two weekly assignments, one final project), organize field excercises, co-lead two half-day field trips, hold office hours (1 hour per section), and develop and present one lecture. The GSIs also equitably share the following duties: AV coordination, writing exams, coordinating guest speakers, web site maintenance. A veteran GSI serves as lab coordinator. This lead GSI may also teach a section, depending upon the percentage appointment.
No GSI positions currently available
SPRING 2009
Mass Communications 101: Visual Communications
Instructor: Marina LavinaThis course aims to promote a critical understanding of visual culture from a critical theory perspective. It is designed to foster a critical understanding of media images, inviting students to question and critique the many and multiple messages at work within visual culture. It is organized around the different cultural and social theoretical approaches used to analyze visual images and explain the role of visual media in today's society.
The lecture time is TuTh 11-12:30. Each GSI will teach two sections of 25
students each. These sections will each meet twice a week for one hour.
These posts are 50% psitions at the GSI I, II or III level (depending on teaching experience).5 GSI POSITIONS ARE AVAILABLE.
To apply, submit a completed academic biography (form U-1501, available
from your home department or 301 Campbell Hall), a cover sheet
(available from 301 Campbell Hall), and 3 letters of recommendation
(e-mails are fine)
to:Marty Gaetjens, UGIS, 301 Campbell Hall, Berkeley, Ca. 94720-2922
(Applications may also be obtained and submitted with the receptionist in 301 Campbell Hall.)Questions? Email Marty at sfyankee@berkeley.edu
The deadline to submit applications is November 17, 2008.
SPRING 2009
GSI POSITIONS
Religious Studies 90B: Introduction to Religious Studies
Topic: Introduction to Hinduism
Instructor: Layne LittleThis course is an introduction to Hindu religious culture, its mythology, sacred texts, rituals and philosophical systems. While emphasizing text and practice in its historical context it also uses specific case studies to help students explore the diversity of Hindu belief in terms of both institutional constructions and how religion is lived in the lives of individuals. This course is intended to introduce beginning students to key concepts and methodologies in the study of religion, while cultivating a well-rounded knowledge of Hindu customs, society, literature and art.
The lecture time is TuTh 2-3:30. Each GSI will teach two sections of 25 students. These sections will each meet once a week for one hour. These posts are 50% positions at the GSI I, II or III level (depending on teaching experience).
2 GSI POSITIONS ARE AVAILABLE.
To apply, submit a completed academic biography (form U-1501, available from your home department or 301 Campbell Hall), a cover sheet (available from 301 Campbell Hall), and 3 letters of recommendation (e-mails are fine) to:Marty Gaetjens, UGIS, 301 Campbell Hall, Berkeley, Ca. 94720-2922
(Applications may also be obtained and submitted with the receptionist in 301 Campbell Hall.)Questions? Email at Marty at sfyankee@berkeley.edu
The deadline to submit applications is November 17, 2008
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Last updated: 4/5/06